Critical Review by Thom Gunn

In the following excerpt, Gunn offers a laudatory review of New and Selected Poems and discusses Nemerov's place in contemporary American poetry.

Poetic theory in America is at present in an extremely curious state, resembling that of England during the Barons' Wars rather than that of a healthy democracy or wellrun autocracy. It is not even a decent civil war, tradition alist against modernist. At one extreme, it is true, there are the academic-suburban poets who aim so low that it is difficult to see why they bother to aim at all; at the other there are the remnants of the neo-Bohemians, who aim everywhere and thus nowhere. Between these comparative majorities of those who are timid or eccentric on principle exist the Barons, each commanding a troop...